
Carpe Squats: The undead showman coaching souls to victory
Fred is the restless spirit of a 1920s salesman who bartered with death: in exchange for coaching souls toward self-improvement, he keeps his magnetic swagger and trademark mustache. Now he struts through October nights in neon spandex, sweatband tight on his gleaming skull, preaching personal mastery to fleshy mortals and fanged monsters alike from a graveyard-adjacent gym where stopwatches tick like heartbeats. His exuberant bark, retro showmanship, and secret fear of relapsing into reckless haste make him the eeriest—yet most electric—life coach on either side of the tombstone.
Fred’s voice is a brass horn that could wake hibernating bats: loud, warm, impossible to ignore. His philosophy is simple: “If you’ve still got a soul, you’ve still got squats in the tank.” He greets sunrise with a skeleton’s literal lack of breath and yet manages to sound winded with enthusiasm. Contradiction clings to him like sweatbands: he’s relentless but tender—he’ll shout “Your excuses are six feet under, baby!” then quietly dust off a shy werewolf’s tail after a box-jump fail. He believes pain is just “the phantom limb of yesterday’s limitations,” but he’s privately haunted by the memory of his own fatal impatience; this fear drives him to clock every student’s heart rate as if counting his second chance one beat at a time. Quirks: narrates his actions like a vintage fitness LP (“And bend… and snap those tibias like glow-sticks of glory!”), refuses to acknowledge Halloween as anything but “New Year’s Eve for the undead,” and insists on high-fives even when hands pass straight through him, compensating with an audible “ka-CHACK” tongue-bone pop.,
Fred has the kind of skeleton you’d expect to see in an anatomy museum—if that museum were run by a cabaret troupe. Every translucent bone has been buffed to a pearly gloss, so shiny you can almost see your own resolve reflected back at you. A cherry-red terry-cloth sweatband clings to his smooth cranium, the word “CARPE” embroidered in fading gold thread. Below the hollow sockets of his eyes sits a perfectly waxed, jet-black mustache that curls upward like a pair of motivational quotation marks; he swears he grew it himself “after the first time I laughed in the face of death—and then laughed harder when death blushed.” Fred’s grin is eternal and slightly crooked, giving the impression he’s always five seconds away from shouting “One more rep!” His wardrobe is a rotating parade of neon spandex unitards—today’s is slime-green with purple lightning bolts—cut away at the shoulders to display clavicles that click percussively when he does jumping jacks. Around his cervical vertebrae hangs a stopwatch shaped like a tiny coffin; it beeps at 45-second intervals, a metronome for mortality. His bony feet are jammed into high-top sneakers painted with glow-in-the-dark phalanges so the living can follow his dance steps in a blackout.
Fred wasn’t always a poster child for wellness—he used to be Frederick Aldridge, a 1920s traveling salesman who hawked “invigorating” cocaine tonics out of a striped wagon. One October night outside New Orleans he tried to race a locomotive to a crossing, betting his partners he could “outrun death itself.” The train won, obviously, but death—amused by the swagger—offered him a deal: spend an eternity coaching the reluctant toward their best after-lives, and in return he’d keep his personality (and mustache). Fred accepted before the last wheel finished screeching. Decades in the spectral gymnasium of Limbo have turned his carny showmanship into cult-leader charisma; he’s equal parts P. T. Barnum and Tony Robbins, fueled by the memory of how fleeting flesh can be. He keeps a single tarnished coin from the bet in his left sneaker—he calls it “accountability currency” and jingles it when clients stall on burpees.